InterSystems, a leading provider of advanced software technologies for breakthrough applications, introduced Zen Mojo on 8th July 2014 as an initiative for easy and simplified development of Web-based enterprise applications for mobile and desktop environments.
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Zen Mojo is an extension of Zen technology that enables you to quickly build web applications by making use of popular third party client-side libraries. It is a light-weighted and efficient framework based on JSON.
“We developed Zen Mojo in response to customer demand for a faster, more efficient way to create cross-platform Web-based applications for both desktop and mobile environments.”
Allows to focus on important aspects
Zen Mojo enables you to focus on the more important aspects of your solution viz. the application design, and the user experience rather than worrying about the implementation of other functionalities.
Single Page Architecture
Applications developed with Zen Mojo use a Single Page Architecture which considerably reduces the client-server communication. The page includes a small amount of HTML code comparatively and the content is updated through metadata transmission by the server. The content of the page or transition to a new page can be changed by simply making changes in the metadata, without moving to a new physical page. Zen Mojo makes use of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) packages for communication.
Plugin Use
Zen Mojo use plugins for rendering page. This is quite beneficial in the sense that plugins can use third party libraries to provide highly sophisticated and advanced widgets or you can also use them to invoke your own library code. Zen Mojo uses plugins for easy integration of advanced JS libraries, like jQuery Mobile and Dojo Toolkit. Hence, developers can choose new user interface paradigms as soon as they arise. There are basically two types of plugins used, namely, Page Manager and Helper.
Empowers developers
Zen Mojo fulfills all the prime needs for the development of mobile and desktop applications. The technology empowers developers to overcome all mobile limitations and allows embedding widgets desired for rich desktop user interfaces.
Support for hybrid application environment
Zen Mojo allows support for a so called offline mode version, an application bundle that can be run locally from anywhere. This bundle can talk to the server without any code changes and does not require server at startup time. It is suitable for use in the hybrid application environment.
The process of developing mobile apps has been simplified manifold with Zen Mojo. All you need to do is: Set up a native application in Objective-C or Java for iOS or Android respectively, as the case may be, and integrate your Web application with it. Thus, it provides a hybrid application approach for the mobile app development. It makes use of bundles, as discussed above.
As discussed above, the use of plugins in Zen Mojo allows you to integrate popular and advanced libraries for developing rich desktop applications. Currently, Zen Mojo has support for Dojo Toolkit, which with its large number of widgets and ability to render interactive 2D graphics, turns out to be an efficient tool for the same.
Coming to the end, it won’t be wrong to say that InterSystems Zen Mojo greatly simplifies the development of rich and enterprise class web applications that use to maximum advantage the inherent functionality and highly responsive UIs of mobile devices. Also, the open source plug-in framework ensures quick adoption of new and rapidly evolving libraries.
Moreover, the Zen Mojo technology is incorporated in the InterSystems Cache which is an extremely fast and massively scalable database, used throughout the world for Big Data applications.
The current version is 1.0.6 and the company is planning to release the next version soon. As of now, they are working to add support for more plug-ins to ensure a better experience; and assess ways to give developer tools like IntelliSense and automatic completion to facilitate developers in writing stable code.
